Looks like everyone in the Senate is going to be working through the weekend…

As you must know by now, the parliamentarian blew a massive hole in the Senate bill's architecture by ruling against the Medicaid provider tax provisions that were supposed to pay for a lot of other things.

The parliamentarian argued in her ruling that "ending states' ability to tax healthcare providers would severely limit states' ability to provide healthcare to millions of Americans who depend upon Medicaid for their care" (this sounds pretty political to us). Senate Leadership have said they can amend the provision to pass Byrd Rule muster, although we have no idea what that might be.

The other big problem (to our mind) is the green energy/IRA tax credits issue. Senate leadership claimed they put in a more moderate version, but their more moderate version does not actually change anything; they are still going with the "started construction" standard that not only grandfathers in existing projects but gives a multi-year grace period extending past the Trump Administration. House conservatives have grown louder in their opposition to this.

We would make an observation: the Senators are looking for a new pay-for after the demise of the Medicaid tax provisions… There's one right there… One which would probably be a lot more politically popular and better on the policy.

Finally, there's still the SALT issue, but the noises we hear are cautiously optimistic that the Senate and the House can land on some kind of compromise that both sides can live with.

These issues are all important, but as we get closer to the finish line it's important to not get bogged down in details too much.

The fundamental reality is that this bill passes most of the key items in President Trump's agenda, especially TCJA extension, funding for the immigration policy, and popular campaign promises such as "no tax on tips" and "no tax on overtime." The budget impact is bad, but no realistic bill was going to be fiscally responsible. If the bill fails, the President's domestic agenda is essentially in tatters.

Steady as she goes, eyes on the prize…

Policy News You Need To Know

#TheUnprotectedClass — New Democratic New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's platform explicitly calls for shifting the tax burden to "richer and whiter communities." While anti-white racism has long been an implicit undercurrent of Democratic rhetoric, this may be the first time that a major Democratic Party figure has explicitly embraced anti-white racism. This is a dark and worrying day for America; the only way that this garbage can truly end is, apart from vigorous government enforcement of the Constitution, total and permanent political defeat.

SEE ALSO: Our interview with Jeremy Carl, author of "The Unprotected Class" (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts)

#GreenNewScam #OBBB — Energy activist Alex Epstein has played a key role in publicizing the Senate's proposal on the IRA tax credits, which essentially tries to maintain and extend them forever. He has published his plan for how to deal with the tax credits. The headline, which we agree with, is: "The only way to truly 'terminate' IRA subsidies as promised is to end eligibility during Trump’s term using a strict 'placed in service' deadline."

#DEI #HigherEd — Speaking of anti-white racism, another great scoop from Chris Rufo and Ryan Thorpe at City Journal: based on internal documents, they show that Cornell has been making hiring decisions on the basis of race.

#DEI #HigherEd — Speaking of, some good news: the DOJ Civil Rights division is officially investigating the University of California (PDF), which was the first system to use "diversity statements" in hiring.

#Immigration — "The Trump administration is planning to dismiss asylum claims for potentially hundreds of thousands of migrants in the United States and then make them immediately deportable," reports CNN's Priscilla Alvarez. The idea is fairly simple: close the asylum cases of anyone who entered the country illegally before seeking asylum; this would then make them eligible for deportation. The US asylum system, as anyone who has honestly researched it knows, is deeply broken, and overwhelmed with mostly-bogus claims. Some house-cleaning is definitely in order.

#TheEconomy #LaborMarket — Economist Heather Long has flagged an interesting data point: "Companies are paying people more money to stay in a job than they are to new hires. This is highly unusual. Normally 'job switches' (aka new hires) get the big pay bumps. But that's not happening right now in the 'Great Stay' economy. Since February, job stayers have gotten bigger pay raises than job switchers." One potential explanation is that companies want to retain experienced employees with knowledge of their workflows to facilitate AI adoption. Over the long run this doesn't seem to be a good trend, as worker mobility tends to be conducive to productivity as workers shift to higher-productivity sectors.

#TheEconomy #Chyna — Meanwhile, the South China Morning Post reports that Premier Li Qiang has pledged that China will become a “consumption powerhouse” capable of fuelling domestic and global growth. Li added that China would do this "on top of being a manufacturing powerhouse." The global macroeconomic imbalance caused by China's export-driven manufacturing and relatively lower consumption has been a bone of contention for many years; and Chinese officials have made public comments to that effect on numerous occasions which weren't really followed by actual implementation. The problem is that doing so for China would be very painful, because its manufacturing buildout has been funded by a host of loans from state banks or state-backed banks, many of those loans which have turned sour (very similar to Japan in the 1980s); China manages to finance these loans thanks to the currency it gains from its current account surplus, ie its manufacturing exports.

#JustOneWordPlastics — Fred Ashton of the American Action Forum has published a good, thorough report on plastics, plastics recycling, and plastics' role in the economy. Many call for top-down regulation of plastics for environmental reasons, but, he points out, because "of plastics’ strength, versatility, formability, and cost-effectiveness, they are used worldwide for everything from packaging to motor vehicle parts, construction, and even medical equipment," and the plastics industry's important role in "U.S. employment, gross output, trade, and use in the supply chain," these regulations should be looked at skeptically. He is optimistic that "Industry-led advancements in recycling technologies promise to create commercial opportunities and avoid top-down efforts to reduce plastics waste through production curbs that fail to consider the potential economic impact"; meanwhile, "policy changes that impact the production of plastics would cause significant manufacturing and supply chain disruption to the $358 billion U.S. plastics industry that employs more than 660,000 workers."

#Life #Liberty — The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of South Carolina being able to defund Planned Parenthood. It's yet another win for Alliance Defending Freedom, the great pro-religious liberty litigation group.

#NewNuclear — Palantir has announced a deal with The Nuclear Company, whereby the company will use its software to gain efficiencies and build nuclear power plants faster, the companies have announced. Mark Nelson of Radiant Energy Group, a nuclear expert, comments: "Low worksite productivity has been devastating to Western nuclear plant construction. Interminable waiting, supply chain hold ups, colossal documentation struggles, etc. Palantir is bringing its experience helping the world's largest industrial companies move faster (Operation Warp Speed) together with The Nuclear Company's managers and engineers who have the experience delivering the most recent American nuclear builds."

Friday Essays

The New York Times has just published an essay asking: "Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?" It's a very good question since, even though women have always been bigger fiction readers than men, the novel-reading man used to be a much greater presence in the world, particularly the literary world, and he does seem to have vanished. Unfortunately, the essay seems to be an exercise in self-caricaturing elite liberal disconnection from reality. The article opens with the story of a man running a book club for men whose first assigned reading examined "contemporary masculinity", and caused him to have a panic attack. The piece is however mostly silent on a very well documented phenomenon, which is the domination of women over the publishing industry, and that industry's systematic discrimination against (white) male authors.

The Ripon Forum, the magazine of the bipartisan centrist Ripon Society, has a new issue out, which examines "what America means to the free world," and does so "with essays by Paul D. Miller, Don Bacon, Dusty Johnson, and Jen Kiggans, among others; plus, a profile of Ashley Hinson."

Andrew Sullivan, most famous for being an early advocate for gay marriage, and specifically as a way to "embourgoiser" gay culture, has written an essay for the Times on "How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way." Empirically, Sullivan is correct: the gay rights movement of the 90s and 00s was very careful about moderation and respectability, for tactical reasons; drunk on its post-Obergefell victory, the LGBTQ+ movement believed it could simply hector and bully society into whatever changes it desired, and that seems, at least for now, to have backfired. But in another sense, he may be missing the point: the gay movement's embrace of bourgeois respectability was always just a communications strategy, not a sincere belief in the necessity to adopt bourgeois and crypto-"traditional" norms; in this reading, it was always inevitable that after same-sex marriage, the movement would seek to destroy other social institutions, instead of remaining content with its admissions ticket into bourgeois respectability.

Once again, Ross Douthat has published a must-read interview, this time with Peter Thiel. A very interesting part of the interview was on AI, where Thiel said that the most ignored questions are those he called "intermediate meaning" questions. By this he meant, questions around AI are either super-technical, such as "What is the exact IQ score of the AI?" or either grand questions about some hypothetical future of superintelligence, such as "What does it mean for the budget deficit?," because if we have AI we will have hypergrowth and no longer need to worry about the deficit, or "What does it mean for geopolitics?," taking as an example the idea that if China falls behind in an AI-military race, they might decide to invade Taiwan, thinking "It's now or never."

As we often say, we don't like to often recommend podcasts (except our own!), but this one was charming: Meghan McCain interviewed Second Lady Usha Vance, and this was her first long-form interview since ascending to the role of Second Lady (or ever, probably). It was very heartwarming, and will probably warm the hearts of any woman in your life (many Usha fans around in this writer's life!), and it also enabled us to learn about her Summer Reading Challenge, which seems like a very worthy initiative to try to boost children's literacy and draw them away from screens.

The blog The Generalist has been publishing a series of deeply reported articles on Founders Fund, the VC firm founded by Peter Thiel which has become a titan in Silicon Valley and pioneered a contrarian form of venture investing, backing some of the most innovative and transformative companies of the past decades.

School headmistress Katherine Birbalsingh has become something of a major celebrity in the UK. As the head of Michaela Community School in Wembley, she has been able to produce striking good results out of an extremely multiracial student population by being, as one headline put it, "Britain's strictest headmistress." You can see how this concept might appeal to a lot of baby boomers, as a synecdoche on how Britain might face its multicultural future. But if the price of making multiculturalism work is turning an entire country into a school for children run by a harsh disciplinarian, is that a price worth paying? At The Critic, cultural commentator Connor Tomlinson argues no.

Speaking of headmistresses, if you are at all in Silicon Valley circles, you may have heard about "Alpha School," a private school in Austin that claims its pupils advance twice as fast as other pupils, with only 2 hours of instruction per day (the rest of the day is spent learning "life skills"), and all thanks to AI. If you're like us, you were initially skeptical, but then saw so many intelligent people raving about this school and its results, that you became curious. Well, the blog Alpha Codex Ten has published a very voluminous review of Alpha School, written by a parent who sent his kids there for a year, and then researched the school's history and programs and interviewed many people involved in it. It's fascinating. Does it live up to the hype? Not quite, but even the reality seems much, much better than the status quo.